The Teeth of the Tiger - Maurice Leblanc (feel good books txt) 📗

“They are not forged. All the experts have recognized M. Fauville’s handwriting.”

“Then?”

“Then⁠—”

Don Luis did not finish his sentence; and M. Desmalions felt the breath of the truth fluttering still nearer round him.

The others, one and all as anxious as himself, were silent. He muttered:

“I do not understand⁠—”

“Yes, Monsieur le Préfet, you do. You understand that, if the sending of those letters forms an integrate part of the plot hatched against Mme. Fauville and Gaston Sauverand, it is because their contents were prepared in such a way as to be the undoing of the victims.”

“What! What! What are you saying?”

“I am saying what I said before. Once they are innocent, everything that tells against them is part of the plot.”

Again there was a long silence. The Prefect of Police did not conceal his agitation. Speaking very slowly, with his eyes fixed on Don Luis’s eyes, he said:

“Whoever the culprit may be, I know nothing more terrible than this work of hatred.”

“It is an even more improbable work than you can imagine, Monsieur le Préfet,” said Perenna, with growing animation, “and it is a hatred of which you, who do not know Sauverand’s confession, cannot yet estimate the violence. I understood it completely as I listened to the man; and, since then, all my thoughts have been overpowered by the dominant idea of that hatred. Who could hate like that? To whose loathing had Marie Fauville and Sauverand been sacrificed? Who was the inconceivable person whose perverted genius had surrounded his two victims with chains so powerfully forged?

“And another idea came to my mind, an earlier idea which had already struck me several times and to which I have already referred in Sergeant Mazeroux’s presence: I mean the really mathematical character of the appearance of the letters. I said to myself that such grave documents could not be introduced into the case at fixed dates unless some primary reason demanded that those dates should absolutely be fixed. What reason? If a human agency had been at work each time, there would surely have been some irregularity dependent on this especially after the police had become cognizant of the matter and were present at the delivery of the letters.

“Well,” Perenna continued, “in spite of every obstacle, the letters continued to come, as though they could not help it. And thus the reason of their coming gradually dawned upon me: they came mechanically, by some invisible process set going once and for all and working with the blind certainty of a physical law. This was a case not of a conscious intelligence and will, but just of material necessity.⁠ ⁠… It was the clash of these two ideas⁠—the idea of the hatred pursuing the innocent and the idea of that machinery serving the schemes of the ‘hater’⁠—it was their clash that gave birth to the little spark of light. When brought into contact, the two ideas combined in my mind and suggested the recollection that Hippolyte Fauville was an engineer by profession!”

The others listened to him with a sort of uneasy oppression. What was gradually being revealed of the tragedy, instead of relieving the anxiety, increased it until it became absolutely painful.

M. Desmalions objected:

“Granting that the letters arrived on the dates named, you will nevertheless have noted that the hour varied on each occasion.

“That is to say, it varied according as we watched in the dark or not, and that is just the detail which supplied me with the key to the riddle. If the letters⁠—and this was an indispensable precaution, which we are now able to understand⁠—were delivered only under cover of the darkness, it must be because a contrivance of some kind prevented them from appearing when the electric light was on, and because that contrivance was controlled by a switch inside the room. There is no other explanation possible.

“We have to do with an automatic distributor that delivers the incriminating letters which it contains by clockwork, releasing them only between this hour and that on such and such a night fixed in advance and only at times when the electric light is off. You have the apparatus before you. No doubt the experts will admire its ingenuity and confirm my assertions. But, given the fact that it was found in the ceiling of this room, given the fact that it contained letters written by M. Fauville, am I not entitled to say that it was constructed by M. Fauville, the electrical engineer?”

Once more the name of M. Fauville returned, like an obsession; and each time the name stood more clearly defined. It was first M. Fauville; then M. Fauville, the engineer; then M. Fauville, the electrical engineer. And thus the picture of the “hater,” as Don Luis said, appeared in its accurate outlines, giving those men, used though they were to the strangest criminal monstrosities, a thrill of terror. The truth was now no longer prowling around them. They were already fighting with it, as you fight with an adversary whom you do not see but who clutches you by the throat and brings you to the ground.

And the Prefect of Police, summing up all his impressions, said, in a strained voice:

“So M. Fauville wrote those letters in order to ruin his wife and the man who was in love with her?”

“Yes.”

“In that case⁠—”

“What?”

“Knowing, at the same time, that he was threatened with death, he wished, if ever the threat was realized, that his death should be laid to the charge of his wife and her friend?”

“Yes.”

“And, in order to avenge himself on their love for each other and to gratify his hatred of them both, he wanted the whole set of facts to point to them as guilty of the murder of which he would be the victim?”

“Yes.”

“So that⁠—so that M. Fauville, in one part of his accursed work, was⁠—what shall I say?⁠—the accomplice of his own murder. He dreaded death. He struggled against it. But he arranged that his hatred should gain by it. That’s